The PapillomaVirus Episteme (PaVE) has been established to provide information and bioinformatics resources to the scientific community for research on the Papillomaviridae family of viruses. The PaVE consists of a relational database and web applications that support the storage, annotation, analysis, and exchange of information. As much as possible, the PaVE adopts an Open Source software approach and emphasizes the integration and reuse of existing tools. The first release of PAVE went live in April 2009 and can be found at http://pave.niaid.nih.gov.